Imagine the contact center of the future where your agent is sitting in a cockpit type workstation. All relevant sales and support information for that customer is readily available and automatically sent to the agent depending on the conversation topic through an AI knowledge base and automatic speech recognition. 360 degree awareness of the customer is easily pulled from all customer facing channels. This future is already beginning but lets first talk about current AI use in the contact center.
Current Use AI in the Contact Center
From a 2020 Canam Research study, 60% of contact centers use or plan to use AI in the next 12 months. They are focusing their AI efforts on the following:
However, 22% have no plans to implement AI due to the following reasons:
So, should you jump into the AI pool now? And is the value there to overcome the barriers? We would answer, yes. We believe that AI has matured in the past 5 years to be a much more stable and usable tool, so dipping your toes into AI may be a good idea. Here is what the short term future may hold for AI.
Contact Center of the Future
So what does the contact center of the future look like? Customers are contacting you through various channels like email, SMS, chat or voice, but how you handle these conversations are different. Depending on the customer base, you may have 40% of your chat, SMS, and email answered by a chatbot, 30% of voice calls answered by a virtual agent or voicebot and only 30% actually answered by a human. All of these customer communication options are supported by an AI Knowledge Base; the main brain of your company that knows about your products, all customers, issues, and solutions. You now have 70% of your calls being handled by an AI solution with only the highly technical or difficult calls coming to a human agent.
What can you gain from going moving to AI enabled sales and support? For your enterprise, you will gain cost savings, productivity, agent satisfaction (less mundane tasks), and lower churn. For your customers, you can provide shorter wait times, faster issue resolution, and choice for sales or support, leading to higher satisfaction. Is that value worth the investment? Check out our on-demand webinar, How Real-time AI will Transform the Call Center, to learn more about other contact center focused AI applications, especially ones using real-time voice conversations including:
- Virtual agents
- Agent enablement
- Compliance monitoring
- Churn reduction